Steve Ballmer has just announced that in the first three days of being on sale, more than 4 million people have bought the Windows 8 upgrade. This doesn't count OEM installations or Microsoft's own Surface - just individual upgrades. Definitely a promising start for Windows 8, but then, these are most likely enthusiasts (I'm one of those four million), so we still don't know a whole lot. I'm patiently waiting for the response from regular consumers.

"I download the "upgrade assistant" app to check whether I could upgrade. This made me a bit nervous as I was running a pirate version of Win7. And ... it didn't work.

Seriously? You expected a legitimate commercial OS to upgrade your pirated, hacked version? You were setting yourself up for failure, but I think that was the point of your "experiment". Next time try installing from scratch like any other sane person would when faced with your situation. You just invalidated the rest of your rant with this bullshit. "

Wow. I think it might be time to switch to decaf there buddy.

Precisely none of the issues I encountered were the result of the fact that my copy was pirated. And for each of the issues I encountered there are many thousands of people on fora with precisely the same issues, who were not running a pirated version.

Now, step away from your keyboard. Make yourself a nice cup of tea, and go do the crossword.

You might want to get your eyes checked (since we're apparently exchanging health advice). The very text I quoted from you was your first issue, and your words were it didn't work, which was a direct result of using a pirated copy and you gave Microsoft a negative point in your assessment as a result.

My point being, if you're going to go to the trouble to do a serious evaluation of a software product, do it with the legitimate software and not a compromised version. Whether or not the pirated copy was the cause of any issues (and you already admitted it caused an issue before denying it later), you're polluting the test pool. Therefore, I can't take you the least bit seriously.

Edit: And for what it's worth, yes there are a multitude of issues with Windows 8, which is why I have said in the past (after reviewing the release previews) that I'm on the fence about it altogether. I agree with you: There are a lot of problems they must address. My issue here is solely with your "designed to fail" experiment.